Log Buffer #18: A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Welcome to the 18thLog Buffer, the weekly human-edited review of news from database blogs.

There’s no shortage of conferences and news about them, so let’s have a couple items on UK Oracle User Group Conference & Exhibition (UKOUG) to start. The titular Doug Burns of Doug’s Oracle Blog posts his personal agenda for the UKOUG. It’s interesting to me to see how busy this business of conference participation really is — three-and-a-half days crammed with information to take in! That’s overload. Doug, your last agenda item is very apt.

Oracle + Open Source has a list of some other Oracle-related events in the New York area.

Now for some more Oracle Open World aftermath.

Back on that Tooting blog, Arfur C. mentions the availability online (and the non-availability of some) of the presentations from Oracle Open World.

On ultramookie (currently tied with Radio Free Tooting in the Dave’s Favourite Blog Title showdown), Steve Kong has some points critical of the Oracle Linux thing. For instance: “Support Open Source. If you choose not to fork, then why not put some money, hardware, bandwidth and resources behind an good project? Try CentOS.”

TheOpenForce.com blog likewise takes a dim view of it: “Decisions are made by one guy at Oracle (much to the chagrin of many of his executives) and if Larry decides he wants to fork with Red Hat, then he tells his guys to get it done. So what do they do? They post CentOS for download on the Oracle web site and call it their own. And as part of that, Oracle is now distributing MySQL, which is ironic, but nonetheless appreciated.”

If that sounds to you like damning with faint praise, Joshua Drake’s PostgreSQL Blog takes it a step further. Alluding to Slashdot’s recent problems, Joshua suggests that their choice of MySQL as the DB backend could be improved on in a certain way: “Note that I am not bashing Slashdot. Instead I am noticing a place where they could provide better service to their readers. The recent migration to PostgreSQL 8.1 by Sourceforge … has proven a huge boon in performance.” Lookout! The gloves are off now! It’s almost as though there’s some kind of rivalry or competition between these two open source DBMSs.

Peter Zaitsev of the MySQL Performance Blog has a similar story, Undo area size restriction needed for InnoDB. “…MySQL Server was restarted … and (spent) hours to undo almost 300.000.000 of row operations being unavailable during all of this time. … It would be great…to add innodb_max_transaction_undo_rows or something similar which will protect from runaway transactions.”

The So What Co-op also has a recipe for a quick and dirty MySQL — with InnoDB — backup.

If you aren’t already at MySQL Camp by now, you probably won’t make it, since it begins today. Nonetheless, here’s Jay Pipes’s last pre-camp pitch. If you are already at MySQL Camp… well… don’t forget to chew your food. And write your Mum!

Technical Notes and Articles of Interest offers a list of slogans for MySQL. To be honest, I’m not wild about any of them. I’m sure Log Buffer readers can come up with some better ones and leave them in the comments there. Maybe something like use the_fastest; select "MySQL" from DBMSs; ?

Bob Field of Bob’s World writes about editing a (MySQL) database with sed. Yes, that sed — good old unix-y sed. It’s so crazy it just might work… and it does work! I love little hacks like this.

Sean McCown tells a story of being virtually mixed-up, on Database Underground. He concludes that, “Virtual instances of DBs should be kept to dev and or test and QA. It’s also a good idea to use them in DR sites where you’d have to keep up and running during an outage, but not for long term processing.”

On An Expert’s Guide to DB2 Technology, Chris Eaton has two posts on pivot queries: one on converting rows to columns; the other on, yes, converting columns to rows. It’s DB2-specific of course. Whenever I read examples like this, I always want to compare them with how the other DBMSs do them.

PYTHIAN®, LOVE YOUR DATA®, and ADMINISCOPE® are trademarks and registered trademarks owned by Pythian in North America and certain other countries, and are valuable assets of our company. Other brands, product and company names on this website may be trademarks or registered trademarks of Pythian or of third parties. Use of trademarks without permission is strictly prohibited.